politics

The battered cover of my 1965 vintage issue of Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100, showing a big screen broadcast of the ” First Prophet” who ruled the United States in his dystopia.

In the year AD 2100, an evil Dictator rules the United States. He maintains power through the clever use of advanced science and pyschology. And he is backed by a dedicated military clique….
From Robert A. Heinlein, the dean of space-age fiction, comes this thrilling novel of a soldier who dare to defy Authority who risks his life to overthrow tyranny.

Back cover blurb for Robert Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100, paperback 1965

The copy of Revolt in 2100 I bought when it came out in 1965.

When American (and conservative) science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein was crafting his “future history” in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s, the timeline had a nightmare. In one of the presidential elections in the second decade of the 21st century, the voters of the United States elected a president and Congress that turned the land of the free into a religious dictatorship.

Now as the race for 2016 becomes overheated 11 months before the vote, the candidates on the Republican side, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio would all in someways or another, “fit the profile” of Heinlein’s greatest villain, Nehemiah Scudder, the man who destroyed American democracy in the name of God. Although Donald Trump is far from devout, his support does come from the same demographic base that Heinlein speculated could end American, democracy. Polls continue to show that the Republican base, primary voters, support Trump because, as the New York Times reports, the “most important quality in a candidate is strong leadership, which eclipses honesty, empathy, experience or electability.”

The original magazine version in Astounding Science Fiction of the novella about the Second American Revolution. “If this goes on….” 1940

Heinlein outlined just how the United States would become a dictatorship in an essay in Revolt in 2100. The bulk of the book is taken up with “If this goes on….” originally published in 1940, Heinlein’s first long form work. It tells the story of the “Second American Revolution” when elements of the United States Army mount a coup (or perhaps counter coup) to overthrow the Fundamentalist Theocracy and restore the old, abolished Constitution.

(The marketers at the publishers give it the catchy title Revolt in 2100, Heinlein’s timeline actually calls for the counter revolution to take place around 2075)

Donald Trump was denounced across the United States and around the world on Monday after saying he would bar Muslims from entering the country.
Trump was mildly criticized by his Republican opponents but more strongly even by Conservative voices such as the former Vice President Dick Cheney (whose irresponsible policies helped give birth to Daesh in Iraq) and Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention although Moore’s position on what he calls “religious liberty” could protect Muslims in America but also be used to block rights of minorities, which is what Heinlein feared from the Evangelicals.

None of this criticism, so far, seems to have given any of Trump’s supporters second thoughts. The New York Times, noted that some conservative pundits and radio hosts supported and his rival for the nomination Ted Cruz “pointedly declined to join in the scolding. ‘I commend Donald Trump for standing up and focusing America’s attention on the need to secure our borders.’”

His popularity appears to be growing. Although the loudmouth Trump makes the most news with his vicious racist and outrageous statements, he is tapping into an undercurrent of rage among some, mostly white, Americans, the very thing that Heinlien feared. The other Republican candidates are also campaigning for the same voting bloc. How big is that bloc? Polls differ so what happens in the next few months must be watched closely.

Everyone assures themselves, there is no way that Donald Trump could ever become president of the United States. There are already predictions that if nominated, he would lose in a landslide probably to Hilary Clinton and with that the Republicans could also lose control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

A later Signet edition of Revolt in 2100.

Heinlein’s nightmare scenario may just be possible, so it is time to look closely at what the Grand Master of Science feared so much that he never actually wrote the stories of the collapse of American democracy, which is why he called the essay “Concerning Stories Never Written.”

Heinlein cautioned that his stories “were never meant to be a definitive history of the future (concerning I know no more than you do).”

He was wrong on specifics. The timeline called for colonies on Mars and Venus ( which science fiction authors of the time hoped would be habitable) by the new millennium. “They are just stories, meant to assume and written to buy groceries.”

Heinlein explained that he would probably never write the two novels about the collapse of democracy in the United States (he never did but he did make passing references in some later novels) because “they both have the disadvantage of being ‘down beat’ stories; their outcomes are necessarily unpleasant,” adding there was already enough tragedy in the headlines of the mid-1960s. “I don’t want to write tragedy just now and I doubt if you want to read it.”

The first of the two “missing” novels was The Sound of His Wings that told the story of the rise of Reverend Nehemiah Scudder, “the ‘First Prophet,’ President of the United States and destroyer of its Constitution, founder of the Theocracy.” The second, The Stone Pillow, takes place in the period between the establishment of the Theocracy and the revolution that ends it. That downer novel would have been about “the slow build-up of a counter-revolutionary underground” whose members “rested their heads on pillows of stone—in or out of prison.”

Robert Heinlein’s science fiction “future history” which showed that there would be a “Religious Dictatorship in the United Statesbeginning around 2016. (click to enlarge)

So how did the United States become a theocracy? Heinlein wrote:

[T]he idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture, it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times with us in the past. It is with us now; there is has been a sharp rise in evangelical sects in this country in recent year, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific and anti-libertarian.
It is truism that any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young and by killing, locking up or driving underground all heretics…It is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.

A later redesign of the cover.

That statement certainly describes the Islamist fanatic Daesh, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the others. It could also, if unchecked by mainstream values and America’s ingenious system of checks and balances describe the religious right and the Tea Party in the United States. Heinlein was optimistic, noting “The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition to against each other.” It was that kind of coalition that elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Then Heinlein asks, could that theocratic dictatorship actually happen? This is the frightening part, a science fiction writer in the mid-1960s describing America in 2015 the time he predicted problems would mount.

[A] combination of a dynamic evangelist, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s (link) effort look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth and a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism , anti-Negroism and large dose of anti-‘furriners’ in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result could be something quite frightening—particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.

The United States is discovering, very quickly, that a charismatic single-issue candidate whose single issue is bigotry and intolerance can attract significant support, and possibly even seize control of a major party…no mainstream candidate in recent history has used discrimination and racial fear not as a means to power but as an end in itself, as a chief policy goal.

The 1953 hardcover edition of Revolt in 2100, with a figure with a Klan-like hood tapping a man on the shoulder.

In Heinlein’s unwritten novel, Scudder inherits millions from a widow he converted, a widow who also owned a television station. Scudder then teams up with an ex Senator, co-opts a major advertising agency and needing “stormtroopers” (the Nazi kind not the Stars Wars soldiers) enlists the Ku Klux Klan. The result is “Blood at the polls and blood in the streets, but Scudder won the election. The next election was never held.”

Heinlein then wrote: “Remember the Klan in the Twenties—and how far it got without even a dynamic leader.” He adds: “The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.”

The televangelists of the last four decades had the media, their own television networks and the nationwide reach but something was missing, fear and xenophobia.

Donald Trump is certainly coming close to Scudder. He spews nonsense in a violent manner and advocates repressive action. He’s not the only one, his Tea Party rivals for the Republican nomination aren’t far behind. Trump may not be an evangelical (although some evangelicals seem to love him) but Ted Cruz is an evangelical and Marco Rubio is a conservative Catholic.

The Tea Party is anti-intellectual, anti-scientific and (and despite claims to the contrary) anti-libertarian.

Trump has “enough money” and, so far, has used “modern techniques of advertising and propaganda” to spread his message and increase his popularity. Today’s techniques include social media, which Heinlein and the writers of science fiction’s Golden Age never imagined.

Whether or not Trump is the Republican nominee or whether it is another Tea Party conservative ignorant of international relations and “furriner” culture, all it might take would be another major attack on the United States, either by a home grown radicalized nut case or something organized by Daesh to set off the “hysteria” that Heinlein feared and possibly send a Tea Party Republican into the White House—which, of course, is just what Daesh wants to further their narrative the Islam is under constant attack from the West. (The New York Times reported a NYT/CBS poll on December 12, 2015 “Forty-four percent of the public says an attack is “very” likely to happen in the next few months, the most in Times or CBS News polls since October 2001.”)

Could the United States then fall into the dictatorship Heinlein feared? He never goes into detail about how the dictatorship would overcome the checks and balances of the Constitution. But the Tea Party now controls the House of Representatives, if the hysteria meant that that Republicans took the Senate, the president and his allies could control appointments to the already conservative Supreme Court.

Most observers say the demographics are against Trump, He is aiming at one constituency, as Saunders describes it, an older, disaffected,almost all white, mostly male, by and large poor, those who have lost it out in the rapid economic and technological changes of the last few decades, Heinlein was probably right with his description “The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition to against each other.” The majority of opposition that would probably elect Hilary Clinton would be liberal whites, Hispanics, blacks, Asian Americans and, of course, Muslims.

But if a conservative Republican administration, one that tended toward fascism, was actually elected there would likely be widespread resistance within the law which was how many Canadians opposed the recent Harper government through the courts and by other means without resorting to violence.

On the other hand, the reach of the 21st century surveillance state is overwhelming, something that even the prescient Heinlein did not envision. The surveillance state could mean that the revolt in 2100 would be crushed and the dictatorship would continue.

In Heinlein’s fictional timeline, after the revolution, the United States recovered from the theocracy, “The First Human Civilization” began and returns to space. Like Margaret Atwood’s similar fundamentalist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, in Heinlein’s novel, Canada is the refuge, the first country to diplomatically recognize the new and renewed United States. Heinlein writes little of what else was going on in the world during the seven or eight decades that US cut itself off from the rest of the planet, presumably the rest of the world sat and waited for the Americans to lead them back into space.

Today, of course, Daesh and other Islamic movements are a major danger, a threat that to be defeated needs really intelligent leadership and cultural awareness which is absent from even the mainstream Republican Party.

There is the overwhelming threat to our civilization from climate change, which the writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction never imagined.

That means that the climate deniers of the Republican party and a United States led by a “know-nothing” president could be a threat to human civilization, if that president doesn’t also get the country involved in an unwinnable war in the Middle East.

Of course, Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 was “just stories, meant to assume and written to buy groceries.”

A re-elected Harper government would crack down on dual citizens originally from Beringia, sources are saying.

The sources say Harper and his advisors consider many Beringians to be a threat to Canada or at least to Harper’s vision of Canada.

According to Statistics Canada there were at least 1,400,685 residents of Beringian origin in Canada at the time of the 2011 census. Almost all those of Beriginan origin were born in Canada and are Canadian citizens by birth.

Beringians are among the fastest growing demographic group in the country.

“We know Beringians have been following well established human smuggling routes for millenia,” a source close to the Harper government said. “But like most migrants there is no immediate fear of persecution in their region of origin.”

Some of those characterized by Harper and his government as “Beringians” are disputing the claim, saying they have been in Canada “from time immemorial.”

A reconstruction said to represent the notorious human smuggler known as “Kennewick.” If spotted call 911 or Crimestoppers.

The source said the Harper government has ordered both the RCMP and CSIS to search for two alleged kingpins of the human smuggling operation known by the names “Clovis” and “Kennewick.” Investigations have indicated that one of the human smuggling rings may be headquartered in the Folsom, California area.

Another smuggling route is along the rugged coast of British Columbia where the many fjords and islands are a perfect landing spot for “boat people from Beringia seeking a better economy,” according to a Conservative Party source. Bluefish Cave in the Yukon is known to be a hiding place for the illegal migrants for Beringia, the source says.

The sources say that anyone of Beringian origin convicted of a terrorist or any other anti-government activity would, after serving time in prison, would be stripped of their citizenship and deported back to Beringia.

Map showing the human migration, some say smuggling, routes between Beringia and Canada.

“People like Beringians have no respect for Canadian values,” a source in Citizenship and Immigration observes. “Many consider themselves separate nations here, something which is offensive to old stock Canadians.”

Asked just how the government would deport tens of thousands of Beringians to their ancestral homeland, the CIS source said, “We’re hiring Donald Trump as a consultant, he is an expert on these issues.”

When it was pointed out what was once Beringia is part of the old Soviet Union and now Russia, one of the sources said, “Well that will be Vladimir Putin’s problem, not ours and it’s a good way to keep him busy.”

( Just so there’s no misunderstanding the era of social media. This is satire folks)

When I was a little kid my father insisted—yes insisted—that I eat my Marmite.

This morning I woke up to the news that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has apparently banned Marmite, a yeast extract spread, in this country, along with some other British “comfort foods.”

(After 48 hours of world wide news coverage CFIA issued a statement–below–saying Marmite is not banned. There are however, questions remaining, and it’s a fun story)

The news is hot enough for the British media, from the tabs to the respected national broadsheets to the BBC, to relegate Justin Beiber to the back pages (now that he’s out of jail) and collectively express their amazement that this country would not only have a drunken, crack-smoking mayor for its largest city but that Canada would actually ban something most people in the world consider not just a comfort food but healthy.

According to media reports, the CFIA doesn’t like Marmite because it may—repeat may– be illegally enriched with vitamins and minerals, even though the label doesn’t say that.

So why did my father insist that I eat Marmite? Why did he say it kept him alive? My father was a prisoner of war on the Burma Thailand Railway, where allied prisoners, starved by the Japanese were forced as slave labourers to build the infamous “Railway of Death.” (The story made famous for an older generation in the Oscar winning movie Bridge on the River Kwai and chronicled in my book A River Kwai Story: The Sonkrai Tribunal).

The Japanese kept the slave labourers, both POWs and local forced labour on a minimal starvation diet. One of the problems was that the Japanese served polished rice which, in combination with the lack of other food, created a Vitamin B deficiency. Polishing removes the outer husk of a grain of rice and it is that outer husk that is rich in vitamins. That Vitamin B deficiency causes a disease known as beriberi.

Symptoms of beriberi include weight loss, emotional disturbances, impaired sensory perception, weakness and pain in the limbs, and periods of irregular heart rate. Edema (swelling of bodily tissues) is common. It may increase the amount of lactic acid and pyruvic acid within the blood. In advanced cases, the disease may cause high output cardiac failure and death.

Today beriberi is rare, found usually where people have been displaced by war or natural disaster and have no or little access to proper nutrition. In even rarer circumstances people with HIV/AIDS or eating disorders may show symptoms of beriberi.

The POWs desperately needed a source of Vitamin B and luckily, at least at the beginning of their imprisonment in Singapore, the city had large stocks of Marmite, which were recovered from warehouses in the city and stored, then rationed to the prisoners.

According to most media reports, the CFIA intercepted a shipment bound for Brit Foods in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, then local food safety officials raided the store and removed the offending items from the shelves.

The other items banned are all favourites in Britain including Ovaltine, Bovril, Lucozade and Penguin bars.

Bill Hotchkiss, owner of Mrs. Bridges’ British Bakery in Toronto, told CTV News that the crackdown is going even further.

Hotchkiss has been operating his store for 20 years, but says crackdowns in the last five years have made it hard to keep his small business afloat.
The problem, he says, is that CFIA rules on imported products are constantly changing, and shop owners aren’t made aware of changes on restricted ingredients.

Hotchkiss says products that contain certain food colouring have been barred, but he says he has been most affected by crackdowns on fish products. Customer favourites such as fish paste, salmon spread and pressed cod, which were sold in his store for about 10 years, have recently been taken off the shelves because they don’t meet CFIA regulatory requirements.

The CFIA, of course, is the same agency that considered listeria and other problems in Canadian meat a public relations problem rather than a food safety problem.

It also appears that CFIA is aiming at those who have few resources to fight back like British specialty stores. I get my Marmite at Overwaitea, owned by entrepreneur Jimmy Pattison. So far no reports of the CFIA taking Marmite off the shelves of the big supermarkets.

What about Vegemite?

There are no reports of the CFIA cracking down on the Australian version of Marmite, called Vegemite, created by the Aussies in the First World War when they couldn’t get Marmite. Australians are weaned on Vegemite, every Aussie friend I have is addicted to Vegemite. When I was living in London in the early 1980s New South Wales House had a huge display of Vegemite in its window.

Warning to Stephen Harper, if the CFIA continues with this ridiculous crackdown and extends the Marmite ban to Vegemite, it is highly likely that Australia will break off diplomatic relations (at the very least).

It took 48 hours of world wide coverage for the vaunted Stephen Harper media machine to wake up and realize the world was paying attention to this story while was gazing at the ruins of Petra.

Irn Bru and Marmite are not banned for sale in Canada. These products have been available on Canadian store shelves for more than a decade and will continue to be sold in stores across Canada.

Recently, a shipment containing a number of products imported from the UK was detained in the course of regular border activities because it contained meat products that were not accompanied by the required documentation.

The Toronto Transportation Commission calls the overnight bus service the Blue Night Network. But for more than 30 years the outbound buses that move out of the downtown core after the bars close have been somewhat affectionately called the “vomit comets.” For good reason. The term first applied only to the Night Yonge bus which would crawl up the city’s main artery packed with mostly young people heading home after a night in the bars, clubs and discos. Inevitably some of those who had over indulged that night would vomit. Sometimes the driver, warned of an impending eruption would let the kid off the bus and wait while he or she completed what had to be done.

With the TTC’s expansion of night service in the past decades, the vomit comets has come to refer to all the night services, street cars and buses, that snake out of downtown in the early hours of the morning. (And with the growth of business in the suburbs that means there will also be people heading in town from suburban entertainment locations)

I left Toronto a year ago and have watched with horror the devastation that Mayor Rob Ford wants to impose on what was once called “the city that works.”

I have also waited for my former colleagues in the media who were quick to see the problems that closing libraries would cause to pick up on the utter and total stupidity of eliminating, cutting back or making the night bus service a “premium service.” Unfortunately, the Toronto media hasn’t yet picked up on this story. Today’s stories were all about subway and bus over crowding.
The Toronto Star reports on the recommendations going before the Executive Committee for cuts here

TTC: Consider rolling back some of the service improvements implemented under the Ridership Growth Strategy, including changes to the crowding standard. Also consider reducing/eliminating the Blue Night Network or making it a premium service by raising fares;

This recommendation that first came from the consulting firm KPMG is a prime example of the kind of short sighted bubble minded thinking that led Conrad Black (someone who I seldom agree with. This time I do agree) with to say in the National Post that United States wasted $1-trillion in consulting fees in 2008.

It certainly appears that the KPMG report was a waste of taxpayers money, one has to wonder what city they were talking about?

Unfortunately this elimination of service is now apparently favoured by the city staff and Mayor Rob Ford and his allies on council.

So a question for the Lincoln driving consultants at KPMG and for Mayor Rob Ford, who apparently wants to get everyone into cars no matter what, is this: once you close down or cut back the night pubic transit network, how many deaths and injuries from impaired driving are willing to tolerate? In your budgeting on the eliminating the night buses, did you count the costs of dealing with all the accidents that will result?

A second question, for the over paid KPMG consultants, is how are people who have early shifts going to get to work in the morning before the subway opens at 6 am six days a week, 9 am on Sundays?

The last time I used the night bus wasn’t that long ago, about six months before I left Toronto, sprung from a medical clinic after an overnight test at 5:30 am, no taxis in sight, I grabbed a bus down Yonge St and then a second along the Danforth to my former home in the Pocket off Jones Avenue.

When I was much younger, living in a cheap, roach filled apartment on Yonge Street north of Lawrence, in the late 1970s, I often used the night bus, both to get home and to go to work. I was an editorial assistant at CBC and worked all kinds of odd hours. That meant you could get off work at 3 am on some shifts, start work at 4 am on other shifts. The only way home and the only way to work was that night bus.

In my 20s, I also enjoyed all the advantages of the nightlife of downtown Toronto, grabbing the Night Yonge bus at 2, 3 or 4 in the morning. The bus, no matter the early hour, was often packed full of people, mostly young, but also older, some who had too much alcohol or other substances.

Many years later, in the 1990s, when I was an early morning lineup editor for what was then Newsworld it was back on the night bus, to head into work, along with other people whose jobs called for them to be at their desks or work places long before the subway began running.

Most of these folks were not relatively well paid TV news lineup editors. So I have to wonder if they can afford the premium fares? One wonders if the consultants, senior city bureaucrats and council members actually know who ride the night buses? Why would the consultants and the city even consider premium fares for cleaners heading home after a night of pushing brooms or the barrista who cheerfully gives you that morning coffee? Of course the consultants don’t have to be a work at 5 am, the barrista is brewing coffee hours before those consultants get their lattes and senior city bureaucrats grab their double doubles before heading to their plush offices. Then there are those politicians who only order a double double when the TV cameras are rolling.

I am most concerned about what might happen in the downtown Entertainment District, which is already a headache for the Toronto Police Service. The few times in recent years that I worked past the subway closing at the CBC (now on Front Street) and would grab the Queen car home, my fellow passengers on the streetcar, coming out of the Entertainment District bars, showed nothing had changed in more than 30 years. Teenagers and people in their twenties still come downtown for a good time, stay past the subway closing and then take the TTC home and many still can’t handle the booze.

Now consider what happens when the night service is eliminated. How are all those people from eighteen (or younger if they are drinking illegally) to eighty (after too much wine at more elegant setting) going to get home, especially if they’ve had too much to drink or have used other entertainment chemicals? Some have always taken taxis, perhaps more will. But a lot of them, who would have taken public transportation, will try to drive and they will impaired.

That means that there will be more police needed to patrol the streets and highways of Toronto at a time when the report recommends:

Toronto Police Service: Consider reducing the size of the police force through budgetary means, and a business based approach to efficiency, and effectiveness. This could include reducing or temporarily eliminating hiring of new officers, providing incentives for early retirement benefits savings, and one-officer patrols in appropriate circumstances;

If the drunks get into accidents, and they will, that means a greater, not lesser need for Toronto Fire and EMS. But the report recommends.

l. Consider reducing the range of medical calls to which the fire department responds;
m. Consider the opportunities to improve fire response times and decrease equipment requirements through dynamic staging of equipment;
n. Consider integrating EMS and Fire organizationally and developing new models to shift resources to EMS response and less to fire response over time;

So if more drunks are on the road and we need more cops to stop those drunks, more fire and EMS to respond to emergencies, that means the first responder resources will be taken from other areas

Then of course, if people are injured, there are hospital costs, borne by the provincial taxpayers. If they are charged and many will be charged there are court costs. If convicted and jailed, provincial or federal prison costs (lots of room in the jails Harper and Toews want to build). City road staff may be called upon to cleanup accident sites. Hydro staff to put up the hydro poles that are knocked down by drunk drivers.

Have the insurance companies thought about what eliminating night bus service will do to their bottom lines? Probably not, but I am sure if the TTC cutbacks go ahead, the CFOs of insurance companies are going to love Rob Ford and then they will raise the already high premiums for residents of Toronto another notch.

The trouble with short-sighted ill-considered slash and burn budget cuts is that there is never any consideration of the “for the want of a nail, want of a shoe” consequences. Closing and cutting libraries is foolish, it threatens the long term viability of society by eliminating places that people can learn and improve themselves.

Closing night public transportation is actually a threat to human life.

Here in Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has twice prorogued parliament to avoid political challenges, first the threat of a coalition of the three opposition parties and second a rather unsuccessful attempt to avoid nasty questions about the treatment of Afghan detainees.

When Harper porogued parliament, all the government bills on the order paper died and had to be reintroduced in the new session of Parliament. In Canadian democracy, federal or provincial, the same thing happens when the prime minister (or premier) goes to the governor general (or lieutenant governor) to “drop the writ” and call an election.

The outrage among Canadians at Harper’s tactics was loud and clear and many, even some Conservative supporters, consider the second proroguation an affront to democracy.

But there’s a silver lining to all that…… in our nuanced world, nothing is ever black and white.

If a government is facing the electorate, the death of those bills is a key element in democracy, any bills should be stopped until a new parliament can consider them.

Not apparently at the Mother of Parliaments, at Westminster, where there is what my friends in the UK call the “mash-up.” The actual political term is apparently “wash-up.” That means after the election is called, the not-so-honourable members get to push through bills at the last minute. “Mash-up” is certainly a more appropriate term.

Based on my Canadian experience, I was rather surprised at the blogs, tweets and Facebook entries from the United Kingdom that said the controversial digital economy bill was still alive and to be voted on in Parliament, even after Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the Queen to ask for the disolution of Parliament for an election.

The government forced through the controversial digital economy
bill with the aid of the Conservative party last night, attaining a
crucial third reading – which means it will get royal assent and become
law – after just two hours of debate in the Commons.

The bill claims to promote the “digital economy” by what some say are draconian copyright provisions. As a creator and writer, I am very much in favour of copyright and copyright enforcement. This UK law (or will be law as soon as the Queen signs it) is largely the creature of the giant media companies and follows their agenda. There are even fears that the bill could lead the UK to block Google and sites like Wikileaks..

So the law is not a step forward to protect creators but a step by the media corporations to protect their empires. The only outcome will be more income from media lawyers, bureaucrats and whatever copyright police come into existence, rather than a real attempt to create a 21st century copyright framework.

The Conservatives who appear on shows like the CBC’s Power and Politics, routinely dismiss the Facebook group as meaningless. (They were saying that it was meaningless with the first 80,000 in the day after the FB group was created and still say so). But there is no election on the Canadian horizon.

So the UK election will be a big test of how engaged and energetic the digital generation will be (that is if they have someone to actually to vote for since MPs from all three parties, Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat supported the monstrosity.)

Canada does need an up-to-date copyright law that respects the real creators of content in the 21st digital ecosystem. So far, no new law is on the horizon here, likely because of the minority government.

Although the Conservative government (and the Liberals before them) pull all kinds of parliamentary tricks, which each time they are used, take politicians to a new low, Canadians can be thankful that the great election mash up doesn’t happen here. *Yet.*

Note Until March 31, when I took early retirement, I worked for CBC News.